


in the lonely hour

by mishcollin



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-20
Updated: 2014-06-20
Packaged: 2018-02-05 12:31:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1818646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mishcollin/pseuds/mishcollin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You wish you loved him differently, loved him for another time or another place, but you love him the only way you know how, with your hands tied behind your back, gasping for breath into the hollow spaces he leaves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	in the lonely hour

You don't know how to love with words. You love quietly, in the hushed breath of prayers, in the abandoned and dust-frosted pews of the church in your hometown; you love destructively, like the ways you saw in the movies as a kid when everything was luminous and silver-edged.

"I'm scared," you tell him one morning and you don't quite mean to say it. You're angry with yourself for speaking it aloud, those two simple, uttered words that are poor and pale mimicries of the unspoken confessions that make your chest ache in all the wrong places. 

His brow furrows but his eyes don't follow suit because, you think, he suspects what you mean. "Of what?" 

He's scared too. You first knew it the time you two were on a solo hunt in Indiana and you almost got yourself shredded into coleslaw by a rugaru. The rugaru was dead before it hit the ground and you were being shaken suddenly, painfully in his arms and he was calling your name, over and over. The raw terror in his eyes as he hung over you, bright like lanterns through the haze of your fading vision, haunts you before you sleep some nights. After you choked on his name, he'd put both hands on your face wordlessly and breathed in, quick and desperate.  

"I don't know what I would do if," he had said in a moment of weakness; his hands were trembling on your skin and he didn't finish his sentence and you pretend now as though you'd never heard it (but something changed after that). He'd kissed your forehead when you'd dangled on the edge of unconsciousness, and that too you pretend you forget; maybe, mercifully, he forgets the way you'd leaned back into him, chasing warmth before you dropped off. 

You wish you loved him differently, loved him for another time or another place, but you love him the only way you know how, with your hands tied behind your back, gasping for breath into the hollow spaces he leaves. You and him with one another, you know, is like balancing on the thin razor-sharp edge of a knife. What falling would render, you haven't a clue. 

"I would give so much for you," he says one night, in the pinking cusp of dawn, and perhaps he doesn't know you're lying awake too; perhaps he's talking in his sleep. Your hands curl fractionally in the sheets and your unspoken words are sticky in your throat. 

You're sick with yourself; it makes you sick, this unarticulated tension stacking up in your chest and sometimes when he looks at you in a certain slant of light with the dust motes curling up from his hair and his dark blue eyes half-lidded and tender you almost say it. You almost say,  _God, I love you and it scares the fucking shit out of me._ But this is not how you love; you know you were constructed misshapen a long time ago, all bent out of place, but so was he, and somehow the different fractures in your cracks align to form a whole. A splintered, shattered thing, perhaps not beautiful, maybe not even good, but there's a quiet sense of ownership when you share glances passing in the hallways, when your hand grazes his passing over a hot cup of coffee. The pieces you've jigsawed back together with your bare bloody hands is something--one of the only things, maybe--of which you're not ashamed. 

"My voice used to shake the mountains," he tells you once, eyes misted over and an empty beer bottle rolling in his long fingers. You're both sitting on the roof of the Impala and the right words are resting ready and acrid on your teeth--he can't shake the mountains but he can still shake you, down to the roots of you, like someone's twisted live wire around your bones and said,  _light 'em up._  But you don't say anything to him; you let the chilled quiet of early morning settle like thick dust between you.

You don't love in prose, in spoken soft things in the dead of night, in poetry or in literature. You love in quiet caresses, like a wounded animal would. You aren't quite sure how he reads these things from you, like he's perusing a favorite book for a countless time, but he knows how your wires are crossed; his touches are soft, his words sparse but warm, and it's crazy, you think, it's fucking miserable how even the barest touch from him makes you dizzy, like you're a top set spinning into motion. 

The next time you pass each other in the hallway on an early morning and he lightly drops a hand on your shoulder, you grab at his wrist violently, blindly; you hear his sharp, soft inhale of breath as you turn. You're left staring and lost, his wrist in a bone-creaking grip in your hand, and he simply stares at you as if he gets it. Does anyone get it? His mouth is relaxed, his eyes are sad and heavy and moist with the weight of unarticulated words. 

You say his name as a question, in unintended confusion--you meant to speak it with conviction but the fissure in your voice gives you away. 

Perhaps he doesn't love in words either. Maybe he, too, never knew how. Maybe that's exactly your problem, you think, that language is lost on the two of you, a useless construction of sounds and syllables you never got around to learning. Or maybe you did, but you forgot. You're so much older now and your joints are starting to creak. You're tired and there is so much you don't know.  

His wrist twists gently from your trembling grasp and he takes your hand. He twines your fingers together and he doesn't unfasten his gaze and it feels like someone's dropped a hot coal inside your chest and left it to burn up. 

He says your name back with quiet reverence, like it's a holy relic, and you know you're a coward because it still terrifies you, after all these years. Your eyes are smarting and you don't know why. Your hands, callused, scarred hands, shake in his.

He says it then in a quiet, broken voice, and there's no mistaking it for what it is, a soft confession; something you thought you'd never hear, not from him or anyone else, and you almost miss it in the rush of blood to your head. (It's funny to you, how three words on their own have such little significance, but threaded together they're an illumination, a revelation.)

It's less than a handful of words, but everything you didn't think you needed.

Your hand twists in his and squeezes, tentatively. The hot coal, buried deep in your chest, sparks and burns warm.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is the name of one of Sam Smith's albums, which I really liked the song "Stay With Me" so I chose it.
> 
> Fun story: my computer died on the plane so I actually wrote this piece entirely in a text on my phone. Kind of unintentionally poetic, at a backwards look. :')


End file.
